Saturday, March 29, 2014

New Yorkers will wait on line for just about anything—pastries, Supreme tee shirts, designer collaborations, iPads—but given the chance, a few would prefer to pay someone else to do it for them. Enter the world of professional line sitting—a gig that's now so legitimate there are Yelp reviews, Twitter accounts, and business cards for the services.

One group in particular is everywhere: Same Ole Line Dudes, or SOLD Inc, which Chelsea resident Robert Samuel started almost unknowingly at the iPhone 5 launch. ...

Who are your customers? Are they people who are really obsessed, or are they really rich?

It's a mix. I have two or three uber rich clients. One that lives in Palm Beach and another that lives on Park Avenue. One wants Cronuts a lot [for] whenever friends come to visit from out of town. The other end of the spectrum is people who don't have time and want to get a head start on the line. ...

What's the longest time you've ever waited?

19 hours for the iPhone. That was how the whole idea of line sitting came about. I was an employee at AT&T, and I lost my job. I wanted to supplement my income because I used to sell iPhones, and this time I wasn't going to be able to sell them and make a big commission check. I live a few blocks from the Apple store on 14th Street, so I said, "Let me wait in line for somebody else and make them happy."

The guy that hired me cancelled and said he wasn't going to use me—he was just going to get it online but that he was still going to pay me. He paid me $100 and I resold the spot and made another $100, and then I called my friends and told them to come on down, because I just made $200 standing in one spot on a weekday afternoon.

They came down and took up spaces, but after a while they got tired and went upstairs to my house and hung out, and I ended up selling one of their spots. I also sold milk crates for $5 a piece that I had in my house. At this point, the line was getting long and people didn't want to stand, and some people didn't want to sit on cardboard on the floor, so my milk crates came in handy at $5 a pop. That's $325. ...

Do you charge by the hour, or is it a flat rate?

It's per hour. It's $25 for the first hour and $10 for each additional half hour. ...

Do people ever get mad when the person who paid you to wait shows up and switches with you?

That hasn't happened, and that's been one of my biggest fears. ...

I always tell people that if you want us to wait in line for you, it has to be an even ratio. That's what keeps it calm. If you want to come with a girlfriend that's fine, just tell me how many people are coming. If it's four, then we'll reserve four waiters. ...

How many people do you have working for you?

I have fifteen people that are interested and about seven that actually respond to my texts for jobs. ...

What do you do when you have to go to the bathroom?

There's a loyalty between people standing in line—an unspoken code, so to speak. In my experience of doing this, which is a little over a year and half, it's never been a problem. No one's going to say, "You move your feet you lose your space." I just say, I'm going to the bathroom, and find the nearest Starbucks and offer to get them a coffee or something.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Another interesting feature about this endlessly repeating four-chord progression: This song has an ambiguous tonality. “Teenage Dream” denied the listeners the I chord to create weightlessness; in “Get Lucky,” it is aurally unclear what the I chord even is!

See, the song can be heard in two different keys. Most of the time it sounds as if it’s in the minor mode of A Aeolian*—the scale goes A B C D E F G—essentially, a form of A minor, which appears as the third of the four chords (“We’re up all night for good fun”).

But the first chord of the progression isn’t A minor, it’s D minor. The song slides smoothly back to it each time (“I’m up all night to get some”). The insistence of the D minor creates the aural illusion that the song could in fact be in the minor mode of D Dorian—D E F G A B C. Note that the D Dorian scale contains all the same notes as A Aeolian, all the same keys on the piano. The only difference is what key you start on.

So, when the chord cycle comes back around to the beginning, the D minor, each time, the ear is tricked for a moment into thinking that the song is in a different key, a musical Tilt-a-Whirl. I am not going to lie: To my ears the song is clearly identifiable as A minor, but on a Kinsey scale, I’d rate it a 3.

This Tilt-a-Whirl ambiguity is easy for the ear to discern and also easy to describe even without any musical background. Even untrained music writers typically will use the word “cyclical” or “spiraling" to describe this type of ambiguous progression. ...

Third observation: Daft Punk pulls off a classic move in this song during the bridge, at that moment when the chorus of robots breaks it down. The move? They overlay the hook from the pre-chorus with the hook from the chorus, getting them both going simultaneously. This is not an original device, but a classic one in the world of Western music theory, subject and countersubject. Two melodies that live separately but will join together in a climax of ecstatic melodic copulation.

Below is a transcription of the hook (robots) and pre-chorus (Pharrell). See how elegantly the rhythms counterbalance each other! One is busy and syncopated and repetitious, the other is straight and simple and has a nice long arc to it. And yet they’re both such strong hooks on their own! If these four bars appeared on a counterpoint exam, it would get impressive marks.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.

Monday, March 24, 2014

The majority of humor experts today subscribe to some variation of the incongruity theory, the idea that humor arises when there’s an inconsistency between what people expect to happen and what actually happens. Incongruity has a lot going for it—jokes with punch lines, for example, fit well. But scientists have found that in comedy, unexpectedness is overrated. In 1974, two University of Tennessee professors had undergraduates listen to a variety of Bill Cosby and Phyllis Diller routines. Before each punch line, the researchers stopped the tape and asked the students to predict what was coming next, as a measure of the jokes’ predictability. Then another group of students was asked to rate the funniness of each of the comedians’ jokes. The predictable punch lines turned out to be rated considerably funnier than those that were unexpected—the opposite of what you’d expect to happen according to incongruity theory.

There’s another problem with these theories. While they all have their strengths, they share a major malfunction: They can’t explain why some things are not funny. Accidentally killing your mother-in-law would be incongruous, assert superiority, and release pent-up tensions, but it’s hardly a gut buster if you have to explain the catastrophe to your wife. ...

Working with his collaborator Caleb Warren and building from a 1998 HUMOR article published by a linguist named Thomas Veatch, [Peter McGraw] hit upon the benign violation theory, the idea that humor arises when something seems wrong or threatening, but is simultaneously OK or safe.--Peter McGraw and Joel Warner, Slate, on the mystery of humor

Saturday, March 22, 2014

New research suggests that it is possible to treat depression by paralyzing key facial muscles with Botox, which prevents patients from frowning and having unhappy-looking faces.

In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, Eric Finzi, a cosmetic dermatologist, and Norman Rosenthal, a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown Medical School, randomly assigned a group of 74 patients with major depression to receive either Botox or saline injections in the forehead muscles whose contraction makes it possible to frown. Six weeks after the injection, 52 percent of the subjects who got Botox showed relief from depression, compared with only 15 percent of those who received the saline placebo.

(You might think that patients would easily be able to tell whether they got the placebo or Botox. Actually, it wasn’t so obvious: Only about half of the subjects getting Botox guessed correctly. More important, knowing which treatment was received had no significant effect on treatment response.)

Other studies over the past several years have found similar effects of Botox on mood. Michael Lewis at Cardiff University reported that nondepressed patients at a cosmetic dermatology clinic receiving Botox injection above the eyes frowned less and felt better than those who did not receive this injection. And M. Axel Wollmer at the University of Basel found that Botox injection was superior to a placebo in a group of depressed patients. ...

The idea that facial expressions may feed information back to our brain and influence our feelings goes back to a theory of emotion first proposed by Charles Darwin. --Richard Friedman, NYT, on matter over mind

Saturday, March 8, 2014

As a child, [Gary Becker's grandson] Louis [Harboe] loved drawing, and at age 10, he got into Photoshop. He made a portfolio of designs, like icons to use in place of computer-program icons on your desktop; he shared them on his website and on Twitter, seeking feedback from designers and developers.

He didn’t reveal his age; his online profile picture was a smiley face. “You don’t want to tell anyone you’re 11,” he said, “because no one will hire you.”

His first job was to design the look of a puzzle game. It took a week of work. The game maker asked Louis his fee. But he was 12. He had no idea. “Um...,” Louis remembers stalling. “$150?”

“He was like: How about a little more because I really like you?” Louis got $350.

Louis got a handful of such gigs, and email inquiries for full-time jobs, including interest from Mozilla and Spotify when he was 14. The next year, an email came from an Apple talent scout. This time, Louis conceded his age and received this response: “You’re the second high schooler I’ve emailed. What are they teaching you in high school these days?”

In the summer after 10th grade, he was hired by Square, the payment company; he says he heard the predictable “child labor law jokes.” Lindsay Wiese, a Square spokeswoman, said that its internship program focuses on “talent, not age,” and that it looks for leaders “like Louis” who provide a diversity of perspective. Young people understand young consumers.

For Louis, the money has added up, around $35,000 in all, most of it spent on computers and accessories, some on business trips and some on eating out.

Late one summer afternoon [while working on Obamacare], I met my brother Rahm—then the White House chief of staff—in his West Wing office. We chatted, and then he asked in his usual staccato, "What else is going on, Zeke?"

"I'm also working on the medical malpractice proposal I told you about," I began.

He immediately cut me off: "Shut the f— up! We are not doing malpractice. Period. Every time the AMA [American Medical Association] comes in here, they don't talk about malpractice." Their first, second and third priority, he said, was the formula used by Medicare to determine doctors' pay. "We don't need to do malpractice for the doctors, and I am not alienating the president's base for nothing," he barked. "Stop it."

Rahm's reaction told me everything that I needed to know about the politics of the issue. Democrats would accept malpractice reform under two circumstances: if they needed it to keep the AMA's support for the bill, or if they needed it to attract Republican support. Neither was true. In backroom negotiations, the AMA was solely focused on securing higher physician payments—not on malpractice. And not a single Republican in Congress would even negotiate.

The president had already aggravated liberals by forgoing a "public option." He'd offended unions by limiting the tax exclusion. He wasn't going to antagonize trial lawyers, another core Democratic constituency, for no gain.

Friday, March 7, 2014

As we “spring forward,” we take an hour of daylight away from morning travelers and give it to those out in the late afternoon and early evening. Because travel is generally safer during the light of day, it is plausible that the time change affects travel risks at different times of the day.

My colleague Paul Fischbeck and I looked at the numbers and found clear effects on safety for pedestrians, runners and cyclists. There are more travelers later in the day than in the early morning, and consequently extending the daylight in the spring reduces the total number of injuries and fatalities.

As we “spring forward,” we take an hour of daylight away from morning travelers and give it to those out in the late afternoon and early evening. Because travel is generally safer during the light of day, it is plausible that the time change affects travel risks at different times of the day.

My colleague Paul Fischbeck and I looked at the numbers and found clear effects on safety for pedestrians, runners and cyclists. There are more travelers later in the day than in the early morning, and consequently extending the daylight in the spring reduces the total number of injuries and fatalities. ...

Based on the pedestrian fatality numbers alone, there is a case to take daylight saving time from its current eight months to the full year, eliminating the time changes altogether.--David Gerard, NYT, on the case for one permanent spring forward

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Mr. Putin’s aim is not a de jure separation of Crimea from the rest of Ukraine. That would be legally problematic and disadvantageous to Moscow in terms of its future influence over Ukrainian politics. The purpose of Russia’s incursion was to obtain the greatest possible autonomy for Crimea while still retaining formal Ukrainian jurisdiction over the peninsula. ...

A referendum on March 30 is likely to result in a vote for further autonomy, and it would provide Crimea with such broad freedoms that it would become a de facto Russian protectorate. Moscow would then aim to keep the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea indefinitely, and remove any limits on its operations, size and replenishment. ...

This strategy seems to be paying off already. The mere specter of a Russian intervention was enough for the new Ukrainian government to abandon its threat of reducing autonomy for the “rebellious” peninsula. ...

...Russia has a strong interest in nominally retaining Crimea as part of Ukraine. From the disintegration of the Soviet Union onward, Crimea, with its traditionally separatist leanings, was always a destabilizing factor. It served as a direct avenue of Russian pressure on Ukraine, and also guaranteed almost a million “pro-Russian” votes in Ukrainian elections, ensuring the dominance of the pro-Russian eastern half of the country over the nationalist western half.

If the Ukrainian nationalists had been smarter and more farsighted, they themselves would have advocated a renunciation of claims to Crimea in order to remove this needle in their side, but their desire for a Greater Ukraine has trumped sober political calculations.

Monday, March 3, 2014

The author, over a period of 40 years (1960-2000), has conducted interviews and made questionnaire surveys of over 150 conductors, music critics and (a few well traveled) aficionados of concert and opera music. About half were conductors.